We are starting to think that all good things start in Chicago. First, President Obama makes statements about the importance of preschool for our nation’s children in his State of the Union address. Did you hear the collective jaw drop from people who study children for a living (like us) and educators? A president who understands the importance of early education for America’s children? Are we dreaming?

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In a recent article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, aptly entitled, “How to Make a Young Child Smarter,” scholars at New York University reviewed 16 studies with a total of 7,370 participants in which poor children were enrolled in preschool. Children lucky enough to be in these programs — and not in the randomly selected control groups — gained roughly 7 IQ points. But why does this matter? Because IQ predicts how children do in school and what kinds of jobs they can hold after.